What Have We Done?

We've revised the data from top to bottom. That included processing over 300 emails from visitors who offered evidence, fresh studies and often angry criticism of our ratings. People invested in Fish Oil & Omega 3? Chill out! (Maybe try smoking some of that fish oil?)
We've also factored in a bunch of new studies from the last year. Revised our categories. And added a series of new supplements including: chromium, rhodiola rosea L., grape seed extract, coconut oil and melatonin.
We also worked with the Cochrane Institute to help improve our library searches and study sources.
See exactly what's changed in our change log.
(Note: the still image version is still using old data as I haven't had time to update it yet.)

SnakeOil Analytics

We've had analytics running on the app over the last 6 months. That's allowed us to track the exact way people use the viz and which supps they explore.
• visitors: 750,000
• visitors who interacted: 220,000 (30%)
• most popular filter (by a long way): sex (followed by cancer, anti-viral and mental health)
• most popular supplements (above the worth-it-line): green tea, fish oil, vitamin D, St John's wort, probiotics
• most popular supplements (below the worth-it-line): devil's claw, L-lysine, L-carnitine, lutein, CoQ10, goji (hmmm, lot of body-building supps there)

Snake Oil

» Snake Oil Interactive Introducing an updated version of our interactive 'living image' on nutritional supps. Now you can click on bubbles to see key studies. Try it.
» Snake Oil Top to bottom revise of the data including the grand demotion of Evening Primose Oil for PMS and Chrondroitin for joints. But the promotion of Cocoa for health. Go chocolate! See the still-image, Google Doc of data, or the changelog for details.

Mobile

» Handheld Is Beautiful A special beta-version of this site now awaits users of Iphone, Android, Palm, Samsung, Blackberry touch. Simply browse the site on your phone to activate it. (We're still optimising & designing this aspect. Please leave any comments / ideas / features below)
All this is prep for an exciting new phase for Information Is Beautiful. Cool new projects will be launching soon. Stay tuned!
p.s. we're hiring BTW

A little context

This image arose out of frustration with media reporting of billion dollar amounts. That is, that they're meaningless without context. But they're continually reported as self-evident facts. 500 billion for this war. 50 billion for this pipeline. Literally mind-boggling amounts of money.
So here we've scraped reported figures from The New York Times, The Guardian, and other news outlets and visualized them as a treemap (?). So you can see in one place figures that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.
(**Sorry it's taken me so long to update this image from the original version. I've revised and updated all the figures. Sourced some new numbers. And researched new ideas suggested by visitors. Thanks all!**)
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[post_content] => See the image on its ownDepressing update of our original DeepWater Horizon image.
The oil spill is now on track to be the 3rd worst in history, depositing the equivalent of 22,000 cars worth of oil into the sea every day.

Omega 6 has risen up. But Omega3 has taken a huge demotion. It may soon be restored above the 'Worth it Line' however due to new studies. Just part of a large evidence war going on behind the scenes. Stay tuned.

Cocoa has been thrust into the limelight after evidence for beneficial effects on the cardiovascular system have surfaced.